Ulgoth’s Beard
“The Beard,” as it’s known locally, is now connected to Baldur’s Gate by a web of wandering and deeply rutted cart-tracks (made by farmers of the Beard taking their wares to the city for sale just outside the gates every morning -- which costs them nothing -- or in the market, once a tenday, which costs them a per-wagon entry fee of 2 cp at the gates). This has occurred since Volo’s visit to the place; he wrote the truth of the time about the pack-mules. Around fourteen active fishermen dwell in the Beard, and two of these have a young son each who sometimes go out in the boats. All but one of the boatmen have wives or unwed sisters who keep house for them. Three also have mothers dwelling with them, making the muster of “the salts” of the Beard 32 folk in all. The fisherfolk usually fish two to a boat, and there are eleven seaworthy boats in the Beard right now (plus the bleached remnants of four others that the salts fiercely protect against firewood scavenging, so as to have some source of swift-emergency-replacement boards and thwarts). On most days, seven or eight vessels fare forth, setting wicker pots for crayfish and “stabcage” traps for eels in the muddy swamp-shallows along the edges of the Chionthar-mouth, and then setting drift-nets farther out. In the fiercest winter months, fishing is either impossible or yields nothing, so the salts of the Beard have to catch and ‘salt by’ enough during the rest of the year to keep from starving. Although the salts traditionally go hunting deer in the woods when the snows are deep, the dangers of forest predators and the growth of Baldur’s Gate (which has led to steady woodcutting and a receding northwards of the forests, making hunting forays longer and longer) have made these traditions increasingly unreliable as sources of sufficient food. All of the salts dwell in dirt-floored, windowless stone cottages with roofs of growing turf (planted with herbs and edibles). Most such dwellings have an entry room that doubles as a dining and living room (and in winter, as a kitchen), and opens into two or three inner rooms that are given over to use as bedchambers and storage (including pantries). The hearth is central, and stones are heated in cold weather to be placed in beds and cold corners, and so warm the dwelling as much as possible. Fisherfolk refer to these humble cottages as their “dens.” In summer, they gather peat and wood (some of which they “slowburn” in clay-choked fires, into charcoal) for use in winter cooking, gather berries from thickets in the “breaks” along the cliffs, and smoke and salt fish. Most homes in the Beard have outside chimney-ovens for all summer cooking, and racks on which the fisherfolk lay out their nets for drying and mending, and (under fine bird-nets) filleted fish for curing. Children growing up in the Beard become shrewd shots with slung and flung stones at an early age, bringing down birds who try to swoop in and seize fish. Such fowl, no matter how horrible they taste (and most gulls and sea-skry cormorants DO taste bad) are boiled in stewpots with small local vegetables (leeks and “thrae”, which are akin to what we call capers, and “durfists,” which pretty much resemble our Brussels sprouts) and much seasoning, to make one of the staples of local fare (fish and coarsegrain nutbread being the others): the thick, oily stew known as “gudgeon.” The Beard is also home to Lharruk the Smith, who with his three strong sons Leth, Mordun, and Roril and his tiny half-elven wife Maerleth (whose fierce temper and keenly-sharp tongue are known far and wide) run the Beard’s tiny, untidy smithy. Lharruk sharpens blades, fashions fishhooks and rope-rings and keel-cradles, and keeps the tackle-blocks of the great boat-cradles working, as well as maintaining the ploughs, wagons, and shears of the farmers, and the axes and scythes used by all. Lharruk spent some years as a mercenary (mainly a “seaguard,” or warrior carried aboard merchant ships to fight off pirate boarding parties and port thieves) up and down the Sword Coast, and later briefly joined an informal adventuring band, wherein he met Maerleth. Neither of them profited much in their adventures, but gained some powerful foes -- which brought them to the Beard and now keeps them close-mouthed about their shared past. Lharruk can handle a sword -- and make one, too. Lharruk is an amiable, slab-faced man with corded muscles and a beard that grows only along the edges of his jaw (and is usually scorched short). He growls and hums a lot as he works, seems to spend all his waking hours patiently toiling, and speaks but little. His sons are easy-going, more talkative and handsome versions of Lharruk who dream of the wider world and talk excitedly over all the gossip that “comes out of the Gate” (drifts up via the farmers and passing peddlers from Baldur’s Gate). The sons get much of their good looks from their mother, who stands about four feet high and has glossy brown hair that would trail on the ground behind her if she didn’t keep it bound up in a long silver sleeve (tube) that juts out behind her head like a tail; from it, the bared “longer half” of her hair returns to spill down her back through a series of rings on the lower surface of the sleeve. Maerleth has fine features, large blue-green eyes, fierce brows, stunning good looks, and a temper that builds slowly, but unleashes like lightning when it breaks -- with biting words to match. She’s an expert etcher of metal, worker in glass (which she can stain and melt into windows that depict scenes), and seamstress -- and, say some elders of the Beard, an alluring barefoot dancer who can hurl daggers with deadly accuracy. She has a voracious appetite for books of all sorts, from dusty histories and diaries to tomes of magic and torrid “brightbosom” romances, and peddlers always bring her such things in (high) hopes of getting good knives and sickles from Lharruk’s forge in payment for them. Lharruk brought Maerleth to the Beard over twenty summers ago, appearing mysteriously the day after his ancient, ailing predecessor, the local-born smith Amauntur, died of rattlelungs-fever. (Some in the Beard say that they saw a “door of fire” appear on the headlands, and a “cloaked wizard” stride out of it, staff in hand, to point the way for Lharruk and his wife to Amauntur’s forge.) Of the folk of the Beard, only Maerleth knows that Lharruk’s given name is Ilve, just as only he knows her family name is Summertide, and that she originally hailed from Secomber. (Elminster refuses to say if he was the mage who brought the couple to Ulgoth’s Beard, but he did once mention that “The Summertides keep a low profile for very good reasons.”) The cliffs north of the Beard are the haunts of shrieking seabirds (primarily gulls and sea-skry, but also sandpipers and the grouse-like, edible “mrawkers,” who eat so many insects that flies and stinging things are almost unknown in the Beard), and are riddled with tiny one-room caverns caused by water seeping into cracks in the rock, freezing and expanding in winter to widen such cracks, and so on, until cracks become large enough for rocks to tumble down into them and wedge to form roofs of sorts. Gull-hunting foxes dwell in such places -- and so does “Old Mort.” Old Mort is a shambling, wheezing, foul-mouthed but generally jovial old hermit who rarely bathes (and smells accordingly), and who got caught in a long-ago spell that twisted one side of his face into a nightmare of extra (sightless and milk-white) eyes, ears, and nostrils. Colourful local tales about how this happened, or what sort of strange monster Mort really is, abound --but few folk of the Beard know the truth: that he was once a wealthy and powerful merchant of Amn, and knows where a lot of coin is hidden in that country (and the details of even more debts and pacts). His proper name is Endelver Mortraryn, he fled here after the last of his kin (hungry to claim the family wealth) spread word that he was a horrible shapeshifting monster and not the real Endelver Mortraryn at all, and he’s quite content (having snuck back into Amn years later to successfully strangle both the cousin who cheated him, and the business rival who hired a wizard to transform him and several of his colleagues) to live out his days in the cliffs, eating eggs and birds that he catches with his bare hands, pouncing and wringing their necks deftly. Or rather, he lives out his nights, hunting birds as they sleep, and usually snores through most days, wedged safely down some dangerous cliffside cavern. Old Mort has quite a bit of coin hidden around the cliffs (that he brought with him out of Amn), and makes a good living from the folk of the Beard (trading for warm cloaks whenever his rot through, plus bread and the occasional meal of cooked lamb or fish) with the potent moonshine he makes. Called “moonfire” by folk of the Beard because Mort insists that its crucial ingredient is captured moonlight, this sparkling clear liquid is fire-like on the throat and tastes rather mint-like. It’s made from boiled cliffrock mosses and the mashed and distilled leaves of certain nettle-like plants, and Old Mort makes it in three different stills hidden in various cliff caves, and sells it in old bottles, jugs, and pans brought to him by the children of the Beard (for which he trades them little whittled wooden figures of warriors and monsters they can play with). To folk of the Beard, Mort trades it for what he needs, but to visiting strangers he sells it, insisting on a price of at least 1 sp per bottle or jug. moonfire shouldn’t be confused with the phosphorescent, vanilla-sweet green-white elven wine of the same name. Locals sometimes use moonfire to “liven up” especially bad-tasting gudgeon, some think it an aphrodisiac (it’s really closer to an anesthetic), and some have tried to mix it with ammarale below with disastrous results. Old Mort never seems to feel the cold, and the spell that so twisted his flesh also made it numb, so he handles thorns, sharp edges, barbs, and very hot or cold items with the same casual deftness. He likes to chat with anyone who seeks him out, and the folk of the Beard have long since lost all fear of him, because he’s patient with children and likes to tell them truths about the world, and although he loves to look at bared female beauty, the loss of fleshly sensation long since robbed him of all pleasure in sexual matters, so he never molests anyone. The magic that twisted him also caused him to heal rapidly (he regenerates 1 hp every half a day, even if exerting himself), and he long since learned to find his way around every stone and pebble of the cliffs, seashore below, and headlands in utter darkness and the thickest fogs. As the locals say, “Old Mort can find the lost and never get lost himself.” The rest of the forty-odd folk of the Beard are farmers, all of them keeping sheep and small plots of herbs and vegetables (the latter plowed by mule-plough and worked by hand). The most “let’s do things around here my way” farmer is probably Malluth Darake; the wealthiest (though such things are relative; he’d not be reckoned the equal of a successful backstreet shopkeeper in the Gate) is Haeraklo Harndruth; and the most colourful is the handsome one-time womanizer Roldrick Nattyre, once notorious for trying his luck “with every gown in the village” (until four of them got him into a bed and poured a cauldron of boiling water over his privates), and now even more notorious for brewing “ammarale” (‘Hammer Ale’), a dreadful beer that he sells for a copper piece a tankard, mainly to foolish folk of the Gate and passing travelers (though some older women of the village use it in fish stews). Ammarale mixed with moonfire is a highly flammable solvent that makes short work of most tars, pitch, paints, dyes, hair, and any edibles being digested by a human or an elf (typically giving them immediate and violent “runs” until purged, a few hours later). Halflings, gnomes, dwarves, orcs and all goblinkin, and creatures having bloodlines of these races are immune to the effects of this mixture, which was dubbed “gutsnakes” by a now-dead old woman of the Beard. Most of the farmers of the Beard are unremarkable folk who believe in the gods (especially Chauntea, Talos, Umberlee, and Auril, though they all trust in Tymora), work hard and long, and entertain themselves with the gossip that comes out of the Gate. Over half of them are skilled in making wagonwheels, and all of them are expert shearers. They belong to four main families (Darake, Harndruth, Nattyre, and Sluth), and the remnants of five others (Boele, Jannath, Orntar, Palan, and Tethtor). Coming to Ulgoth’s Beard, a visitor will see weedy swamps of islets and floating scum right under the cliffs, guarded on the seaward side by reefs of tumbled rocks that are always wet with sea-spray (and often cloaked in thick fogs, too). The cliffs tower hundreds of feet above the waves, but although they’re always slippery and treacherous due to the everpresent damp (and in winter, ice), they are climbable, offering many seabird-occupied ledges, rock chutes, and even bowls of earth marked by tufts of greenery. Atop the cliffs, the precipice is topped with a headland of wind-scoured rock, which then descends slightly into rolling, windy pastureland. What trees there are tend to be stunted, ground-hugging grotesques, and these conditions persist for some miles north and east, with real woods beginning only along the treacherous cliff edges beyond a distinctively-pointed knob of rock known as Sargoth’s Spear (who “Sargoth” was is long forgotten). The Spear stands over two miles north of the Beard, and has for years been used as a moonlit moot for various conspirators, lovers, and shady merchants of Baldur’s Gate. Ulgoth’s Beard itself lies in a natural bowl in the rock, some sixty feet deep and a quarter of a mile across, just behind the cliff headland. The farmers’ small barns (used for storing some hay and wagons from which the wheels have been removed, to discourage theft) dot their fields east and north of the Beard itself, but their wool-sheds (where their wagon wheels are stored, too) huddle in the bowl with the houses. Ulgothan farmers eat mutton, make tallow candles, and sell raw wool in Baldur’s Gate (making only enough woollens for their own use). Farmers in the Beard are likely to have larger, grander homes than the salts, sometimes with an upper floor and stone floors throughout, but they are all crowded into the bowl with the humbler “dens” of the fisherfolk -- and neither sort of Ulgothan looks down on the other (as a group: there are plenty of petty feuds between families and individuals, as exist everywhere). By day, shepherds in the fields around the Beard keep watch over land, sea, and sky, and swiftly send word to their colleagues and folk in the Beard itself by means of whistles and gestures. By night, at least two elders of the village will always be on watch, bundled up in cloaks and lying awake on the warmest roofs of the village -- and, of course, Old Mort will be lurking about, swift to warn the folk of the Beard of approaching danger. He usually trails behind strangers of all sorts who travel near the cliffs by night, and will rouse the best-armed folk of the Beard if he sees need. There will always be an extra watcher awake (and watching the relevant barn door) when a peddler is known to be sleeping the night away in someone’s barn -- and the same applies whenever anyone is sheltering in Andarasz’s keep (which folk of the Beard call the “Northtower” or “the Old Keep”). The keep of the long-ago pirate lord Andarasz is now little more than an arc of tumbledown stone wall, thirty feet high or so to the north and absent on the bowl or south side, surrounding a square stone tower consisting of a spiral stone stair linking a single square room per level, and rising five levels above the ground (the fifth level being choked with the fallen stones of a collapsed six level, and the other floors being damp, bird-dung-littered rooms of about forty feet square -- slightly larger in the lower levels, and slightly smaller as one ascends). Traces of a stone stair descending down the bowl into the Beard can be seen, but these are crumblingly unsafe, and haunted by the apparition of a silently fleeing gowned woman who appears only on certain moonlit nights. Contact with her chilling form is said to bring on a night of strange visions, but do no other harm (some dispute this harmlessness). The ground floor of the tower contains a ten-foot-wide well (now dry, choked with stone, and a probably fatal sixty-foot fall to anyone tumbling down it), and a trapdoor leading down broad stone steps some seventy feet into “dungeons” (actually linked granary-caverns, two of them natural and the other four painstakingly quarried out years ago). These caverns have been searched repeatedly, are said to be haunted, sometimes serve as brief refuges for small creatures who enter them through crevices around the trapdoor and in the stones framing it, and are used by folk of the Beard for storing firewood, water, and some emergency provisions (barrels of salted fish). In very severe weather or “when dragons attack” (in the last two centuries, there have been three wyvern foraging raids on the Beard, remembered as ‘dragon attacks,’ and one instance of perytons trying to lair along the cliffs), the folk of the Beard will flee to the Old Keep caverns for shelter. Burials in the Beard are usually by boat, with the shrouded body being rolled over the side well out to sea. Marriages usually take place on the headlands, or (if a farming family is involved) in a tent erected on the family’s pastureland; the entire village gathers for a feast. Folk do their daily worship in their own homes, although Chauntea is often venerated in the fields (sometimes by shedding blood over plantings, sometimes by copulation in freshly-plowed fields), and Talos is venerated during storms on the headlands. Folk of the Beard don’t dislike the resident wizard Shandalar, but they don’t speak of him or socialize with him: he’s a private man, an outlander, “and a wizard, at that!” They know nothing of the true nature of his floating house (to them, it just “appeared there, one day” thirty-some summers ago) or of his origins, but tolerate him because his rare dealings with his neighbours are always cordial, he never tries to coerce anyone into anything, or cast any magic on locals except to aid them or defend himself, and keeps to himself. In hard winters or when blights strike, sicknesses afflict the lambs, or the fish are scarce, Shandalar causes plentiful food to appear (usually Old Mort starts bringing it excitedly down from the Old Keep, after Shandalar magically farspoke him to go there). Locals know that “strange monsters” roam Shandalar’s mushroom-growing caverns, and that these miles of passages (“that stretch almost to the Gate, and for thrice that distance north and east”) were both melted out of rock and dug out of soil by spells (and that magic also keeps them from collapsing). They’ve seen his “walking mushrooms” tribe of myconids; see the 3.5e MONSTER MANUAL II on very rare occasions, and have heard that “far more fearsome things” lurk down there. They also know that wagonloads of mushrooms come out of the caverns, because sometimes (when large “buys” are taking place, usually due to ships docking in the Gate that want to fill their holds with ’shrooms) Shandalar hires them (and their wagons and carts) to help with the transport, and know that Shandalar makes good coin off these edibles. Yet as he’s told them that he shares the wealth “with those below” (the myconids), implied that he protects the folk of the Beard from those same strange subterranean creatures, and aids the folk of the Beard without meddling overmuch in their affairs, none of the locals begrudge him his “odd ways” or wealth. The folk of the Beard also say that since the wagon-tracks have linked them to the Gate, increasing numbers of coaches, carts, and even large wagons have begun to come up from the Gate to the wizard. Few of those visitors have been friendly to curious onlookers (some even loosing crossbow bolts at watchers), and the folk of the Beard have generally settled on the view that they don’t want to know who these visitors are, or anything about their business. Elminster, of course, does. He’s prepared to say that these visitors come to Shandalar to pay VERY handsomely to rent temporary storage space in some of his caverns. The wizard, in return, keeps his mouth shut about what he’s storing for them -- though Elminster has done enough prying to know that what he takes in (not permitting any client to actually enter his caverns) includes contraband goods, weapons, stolen magic, and many items and even kidnapped people clients want well hidden. Shandalar examines everything he stores very carefully to prevent magical discharges, invasions, prowlings from monsters or automatons that break loose, releases of spores, gases, and diseases, deaths of stored life and the consequences of decomposition, and has been known to destroy or “lose” certain stored things. Elminster and Khelben have kept a close watch on Shandalar for some time, but have thus far concluded that the mage is primarily interested in researching and crafting new spells and takes great care to remain aloof from politics and power struggles in Baldur’s Gate and elsewhere. They are satisfied he seeks no power, and is no danger to those who don’t directly menace him. More than that, Elminster refused to divulge about Shandalar the wizard -- and would say nothing at all about the mage’s daughters. Ulgothans regard Baldur’s Gate as a constant source of entertainment and the seat of most that’s large and exciting in the world, and pay close attention to news and gossip from it. They also regard news of Sword Coast shipping (especially piracy) as of vital importance, seeing themselves as caught between “the Gate and the endless waves,” but strangely, Cloak Wood (and everything else south of the Chionthar) is not part of their world, and is very seldom spoken or thought of. “Ah,” Elminster added knowingly, “but ye’ll be after adventure, and the things that lure and sparkle with it.” There are, of course, the inevitable (and false) legends of Ulgoth’s treasure being hidden somewhere in, under, or near the Beard -- and of course, Shandalar’s mushroom-growing caverns are where most treasure-seekers go looking. If they go without fierce intent or armament, they won’t penetrate far: the entry house to the caverns covers a broad stone ramp descending into a cavern guarded by animated objects the 3.5e MONSTER MANUAL; these are small rolling metal spheres containing bells, under orders to pursue intruders as mobile alarms, bounding to strike only at creatures engaged in arcane spellcasting, to disrupt such castings, greater stone golems in the 3.5e MONSTER MANUAL and iron cobras in the 3.5e FIEND FOLIO. The golems and cobras are under orders to prevent the passage of all intruders, expelling such creatures with everything they entered with, and destroying them if necessary). Intruders who come well-armed and with organized hostile intent, and win past the entry cavern and its inner rolling stone doors and massive iron gates (each of the three ways on into the rest of the caverns is blocked by both barriers; aside from them and the guardians, the caverns hold little else but glowing globe light sources, ‘sorting table’ stone slabs, and wagons) will soon come into conflict with the myconids and with dread guards in the 3.5e MONSTER MANUAL II. There are also rumors of stranger guardians, such as unique sorts of golems and nimblewrights detailed in the 3.5e MONSTER MANUAL II. Unfortunately for the treasure-seekers, Shandalar’s caverns don’t have any known connection to the greater Underdark (yet), and aside from seemingly-endless mushrooms and the interesting stored items kept in two ‘side-wings’ of caverns, one large and obvious and the other small and well-hidden, they contain no treasure. However, Elminster says there ARE three treasures of note in or near Ulgoth’s Beard. Somewhere in a cavern that’s just underwater, along the base of the cliffs beneath the Beard, lies a large pirate treasure of coins and trade-bars. The chests holding it will soon rot away or be broken by the force of the inrushing waters during the fiercest storms (the only ones that penetrate the breakwaters that guard the swamps), and perhaps the restless waves will spit forth a coin or two as clues to just where these riches lie. Some of the pirates were shut into the cavern to drown when the treasure was placed there, so aquatic undead are likely to now guard the riches. Under one of the homes in the Beard, probably buried deeper than a grave would be, is a bronze serpent in the 3.5e MONSTER MANUAL II that will activate when first touched by a living being, obeying its activator as its “creator.” This tale is well-known among scribes, sages, and wizards across the Realms, but many versions of the tale place it in many different locales. This is the real one. Searchers are warned that there are REAL graves, very ancient ones, beneath several of the homes in the Beard -- and that these many well prove to contain active undead if broken open. And, last but not least, somewhere near Ulgoth’s Beard is a hidden extra-dimensional room: an ancient “safehold” created by an elf mage as a private hiding-cache or temporary refuge. Laeral found it, long ago, and reports that it holds a “powerful” (+4 or +5) Tome of Clear Thought in the 3.5e DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE and a coffer containing six Immovable Rods described in the 3.5e DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE. She also said enigmatically that the safehold had “a strange guardian” but refused to say more. Category:Villages Category:Locations on the Sword Coast